hosted by aaron harris, kat manalac "man-yawl-ik"
- trick for interviews: "if someone asks you a boring question, just answer the interesting one they might have asked and nobody complains"
- donald rumsfeld is a beast at answering interview questions w/o saying anything he doesn't want to say
- pg was driven to start a business by the poverty of boom/bust of being a freelance programmer
- never considered joining a corporation
- "i've never really had a normal job... it's like the idea of eating roadkill"
- "i'm the last person in the world who'd be suited to being in a big company"
- viaweb started making software to put art galleries online, which no one wanted (that's where "Make something people wants" comes from)
- everyone was creating online stores with html by hand; they could reuse the art gallery code as an online store builder with some tweaking
- they thought catalog companies would be the first customers, but it was actually new digital merchants / entrepreneurs
- the sears catalog was the authoritative xmas gift guide
- robert was the guy pg bounced ideas off of... got kicked out of harvard / they met when pg was in grad school while programming late at night
- school is a good place to find cofounders
- went to harvard thinking he'd do general ai then go into academia
- robert worked on viaweb but became frustrated that it wasn't done in a month, so pg asked him who's the smartest person in the cs dept: trevor
- at this point in life, trevor was quite the eccentric, organizing his whole life on notecards
- trevor went heads down for 2 weeks and rewrote the whole thing in smalltalk... which they didn't end up using... "powerful engine, no rudder"
- "this was one of those old fashioned startups where we charged users money, so we knew we had to get users"
- "we were all computer nerds, but i was the least nerdy of the three, so i was the one to call and talk to users"
- "this is where i learned do things that don't scale... it was only later i realized this was the optimal thing to do"
- we had to build the stores for end users with our own builder because they wanted a finished store, they didn't want to build a store
- users (1) didn't think it was going to work; (2) thought the software would be hard to use... this is still the default assumption of many users
- the big incentive for creating software as a service was because they didn't want to have to write code for windows
- the page could be a ui and generate the pages on the fly (back then this wasn't what hypertext was being used for)
- sometimes they'd troll users by fixing bug fixes on the fly on the phone and asking the user if they could reproduce the issue after they'd already deployed the hotfix
- people think they know how users will use the software, but really you have to just watch
- 3 years between starting and getting bought, then robert & pg continued @ yahoo while trevor finished his phd
- they had made the software to sell it... to get money... "e-commerce wasn't my life's work"
- "i tell founders: do what you want" - it's okay to just want to make money
- "we wanted to get bought by yahoo; we flirted with yahoo extensively"
- ran everything on open source software which wasn't common back then; yahoo was like us but run by cs grad students from stanford
- didn't like working at yahoo (big co. problems), left after a year
- startups don't go public now because ceos don't want to deal with public company stuff like worrying about stock price, etc.
- he didn't want to start another company, so he just started writing code (programming languages) and essays... "i basically went back to my old life"
- harvard computer club asked him to give a talk so he wrote an essay and talked about how to start a startup... which led to yc
- steve & alexis from reddit came up to see it from virginia after seeing it on his website
- startups weren't a hot topic in '04 after the bust in '99
- "if you wanna raise money, raise money from people that made the money doing startups and then they can give you advice too... it's funny that's what yc turned into"
- yc was a project just because we wanted to do some angel investing and learn how to be investors
- we didn't have software, we printed out the emails, graded them, and passed them around to each other
- i advise most startups to zero in on the most urgent problem and figure out how to fix it
- the original reddit idea was to order fast food on your phone "my mobile menu"
- yc is not like a school with lectures, it's more like grad school with very customized, situational advice
- we learned that doing startups in batches had all these advantages that we found by inadvertently applying manufacturing techniques to venture capital
- in startups there's a bimodal distribution of outcomes: die or get rich
- "we didn't have a guarantee any of these startups would succeed but it was a sufficiently good bet, which is all you ever get in the startup world"
- sequoia invested in sam altman in the first batch "12.5% of our first batch is funded by sequoia"
- early-stage startups are just so much fast-moving chaos "the founder will have to throw a ball without looking and assume the other guy will be out ready to catch it"
- in retrospect viaweb and yc did so many things right by accident, "the story of my life"
- "yc was started to learn about how to be investors, not make money... that's why it makes so much money because it wasn't trying to make money"